Last Week/This Week: Growing Pains

October 23, 2017 by Ashley Bales

by Ashley Bales

It’s a point in the semester where my focus is so splintered between responsibilities, deadlines, grading, that directing any of that focus to my own writing seems unattainable. This is the point in the semester when I tell my students it's time to buckle down and focus. I’m at my most hypocritical, running in circles just trying to keep up with them and knowing that even if I could find a minute to sit down and think about where the hell I left my characters that I wouldn’t have the energy to take them anywhere productive. Criticism, creation, research, all hard work. Not in terms of wielding a sledgehammer, but difficult to work up to the degree of focus necessary to pull together each of these elements, to synthesize and allow them to flow from brain to fingers and thus produce something compelling, universal, personal—whatever comprises that list of values we associate with good literature. I tell my students to keep working and I give up on my own work until December, when the end of the semester is in sight.

Even though I mourn this mid-semester slump in my own productivity, I recognize the value in this splintering. I engage with a wider range of topics and people than I otherwise would. I apply my perspective to different problems and augment it with new information. When I’m able to retreat back to that indulgent space inside my head, where I’m able to write, the surroundings have changed. This is what learning gets us.

Our universities challenge students and instructors alike to continually break and reform their worldviews, worldviews that are never so self-centered as in those first teenage years away from home. Freshman come to university wrapped up in their adolescence and ultimately will graduate with their prime successes still concerned with identity construction and their own sociality. But they’ll also collect some potent drops of information that may diffuse into their deeper tissues, pull them outside of their selves and allow them to see the world through variously tinted lenses.

Marilynne Robinson, for the New York Review of Books, wrote an impassioned defense of the value of the humanities in an era where American anti-intellectualism is particularly vitriolic. She traced the success of the humanities to their origins in the 1500s, when great thinkers proclaimed their virtues in language imbued with the extravagance of humanist idealism. Support for the humanities recently has been lost not just under the pressures of anti-intellectualism, but increasingly as policy changes (in the form of decreased investment in education) have institutionalized disparities in access that reinforce exclusionary elitism. But the humanities themselves are not to blame and still possess power to unite disparate perspectives and foster exploration.

As a civilization, as a species, we are living through our own troubled adolescence. Humanity hasn't gone through enough mid-semester, mid-century, mid-millenium cycles to know what splintering and struggle can achieve. Or if we have, we haven’t learned our lessons well enough. It is during these times of pressure that were able to rebuild our brains, achieve new understanding, but if we’re unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, know we will come out of this better than before, it’s easy to lose hope. We’ve got growing pains and not enough experience to know if they’ll ever end. It is a debasing, wrenching process and it is our responsibility to make choices about who we want to be when we come through it, but I have to hope we’ll get there; as Robinson concludes: “And yet, the beautiful persists, and so do eloquence and depth of thought, and they belong to all of us because they are the most pregnant evidence we can have of what is possible in us.”

For some explorations of your own, check out Claire Messud’s interview discussing her own exploration of adolescence in her new book Burning Girl, and Eileen Myles’ joyous and accidental discovery of beautiful writing in Stafford’s The Mountain Lion.

This week on the blog, Garrett Zecker stumbles upon an old literary idol, and new pieces from Eddie Dzialo and David Moloney.

Ashley Bales is a current student of The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

Last Week/This Week: Plath, Thoreau and video games

October 16, 2017 by Ashley Bales

by Ashley Bales

A new volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters were released, a piece of news I discovered first through criticism of the UK edition’s choice to depict Plath as “a blonde in a bikini,” and second in a blurb from Sehgal’s piece in The New York Times discussing Frieda Hughes’ (Plath and Hughes’ daughter) defense of her father. Of the things I care about regarding any publication with Plath’s name on it, low on the list are her beachwear choices and her relationship with her husband. As for so many young women, Plath was an icon I couldn’t spend enough time with--pouring over her novel, poems, and journals--but I’ve never particularly given a shit about her relationship with Hughes. I’m interested in her writing, not her biography, or her celebrity. Celebrity is the real issue here and the treatment of female celebrities in contrast to male. You certainly don’t have to think hard to come up with some male literary suicides where popular interpretations of the act don’t rest on victimization. If Plath was a victim, it is the least interesting thing about her and I would rather remain ignorant of the details than let it shape my interpretation of her work.

Is it indicative of certain continually depressing realities that Faber (the UK publisher) chose a bikini-ed image for their cover? Sure. Is there value in using Plath and Faber’s presentation of her work as exemplar of these issues? Potentially. Does it also place feminist debates before celebration of Plath’s work? Certainly, and I can’t help but mourn the continued need to celebrate successful women for their sex before their substance.

On the subject of journals, Wulf, writing for The Atlantic, discusses Thoreau’s “real masterpiece… …the 2 million word journal he kept until six months before he died.” It depicts Throreau’s struggle with balancing literature and science. Thoreau criticized scientists for their unengaging reports. He believed Linnaeus’ binomial nomenclature was poetry, and stated that “Facts fall from the poetic observer like ripe seeds.” Easy for him to say. There is certainly no limit to the poetic details that can be pulled from nature and the more you study the natural the world the more beautifully specific and interconnected these examples can become. The conflict comes in how scientists define rigor and bias, how can you explore the poetry of specificity when metaphor and symbolism are deemed misleading distractions?

For a student interested in a writer’s mind and process, journals are precious; so much more valuable than curated autobiography or criticism’s contextualization. And to avoid hypocrisy, here is Plath, speaking through her journals from the summer of 1958, when she was 26, two years after graduating from Smith College and two years before the publication of her first poetry collection, The Colossus:

Paralysis is still with me. It is as if my mind stopped and let the phenomenon of nature-shiny green rosebugs and orange toadstools and screaking woodpeckers—roll over me like a juggernaut—as if I had to plunge to the bottom of non-existence, of absolute fear, before I can rise again… …Lines occur to me and stop dead: “The tiger lily’s spotted throat.” And then it is an echo of Eliot’s “The tiger in the tiger pit,” to the syllables and the consonance. I observe: “The mulberry berries redden under leaves.” And stop. I think the worst thing is to exteriorize these jitterings… …Defensively, I say I know nothing: lids shut over my mind. And this is the old way of lying: I can’t be responsible, I know nothing. Grub-white mulberries redden under leaves… …Humbly, I can begin these things. Start in two realities that move me, probe their depths, angles, dwell on them. I want to know all kinds of people, to have the talent ready, practiced, ordered, to use them, to ask them the right questions. I forget. I must not for get, not panic, but walk about bold and curious and observant as a newspaper reporter, developing my way of articulation and ordering, losing nothing, not sitting under a snail-shell.

This week on the blog, Eric Beebe writes about childhood memories of his grandmother, Daniel Johnson explores video game narratives, and Shawna Perrin discovers punk-rock.

Last Week/This Week: highs and lows

October 09, 2017 by Ashley Bales

by Ashley Bales

There’s a funny thing about living in times where horror and tragedy are around every corner; media hops along, led around by the nose from one horror to the next, and it becomes harder and harder to find conversations focused on furthering literary interests that don’t stray into the mix. Here lies the conundrum of conformity vs. individuality in the social media age. How to rise up from beneath the dog-pile of commentary and proclaim: “But my voice! I deserve attention!” It takes a mighty voice, indeed. The most a lowly MFA student, slaving away at weekly blog posts, can manage is a meager belly-flop, more pratfall than splashing glory, onto the mess. I demure.

But the conundrum got me thinking about the variety of dialogues accessible in our troubling times. There are venues for engagement—and for god’s sake, engage—but there is additional loss accrued in abandoning personal commitments: to craft, practice, discourse not pre-occupied with the current socio-political moment, enjoyment in a sunny day. These are privileged commitments. The value of directing our privileges towards engagement cannot be understated, but we must allow ourselves time to explore individual voices amid the collectivism.

I went to the opera this week. Actually, I went to two operas, which, despite being in the cheap seats, puts me in the 1% of something. The first opera, Norma, premiered in 1831 when its composer, Bellini, was 30. Walt Whitman was a particular fan of the opera, as I learned from Barone’s piece in the Times. Relevant because Whitman is the subject of Aucoin’s (age 27) opera, Crossing, which finished it’s run at BAM’s Next Wave Festival yesterday. Whitman saw Norma in 1853, when he was 34, two years before he referred to it in Leaves of Grass, and nearly 10 years before he left New York to find his wounded brother and spent the next year volunteering as a nurse in a Union hospital outside of D.C. Whitman recounted these experiences in Memoranda during the War, which served as Aucoin’s inspiration and source material for Crossing.

There is no explicit connection between Norma and Crossing, but operatic tropes run deep. Norma is the story of love and betrayal across battle lines (Druid v. Roman) and Crossing focuses on Whitman’s love for a patient of his Union hospital who turns out to be a Confederate deserter. In my program notes, Aucoin informed me “…Whitman considered opera the pinnacle of human expression...” and, he adds, “…opera is a primal union of animal longing, as expressed in sound, and human meaning, as expressed in language.”

Only amid the pomp and drama of operatic tradition could Norma’s climactic “Son io” (“It is I.”) –sung at volumes shattering even across the soaring expanse of the 3,800 seat Metropolitan Opera House—be deemed understated. The Met’s always excellent program notes describe Bellini’s choice to “…strip away the orchestra entirely, leaving Norma’s voice bare and exposed…” as “…simple and honest…” I love opera for its extravagance. As a writing student, however, I am warned to be cautious of melodrama. Opera doesn’t play by the same rules; perhaps Whitman didn’t either.

Aucoin drew his opera’s title from Whitman’s poem, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. It was written prior to Whitman’s time in the hospital and long before the publication of Memoranda during War, but Aucoin chose it for the line: What is it then between us? This line opens and closes the show, asking the viewer to question what separates us, what draws us together: audience and viewer, author and reader, Union and Confederate, more timely political dualities. And Aucoin, too, adapts Whitman’s words to present concerns:

You—America—contradictory, confus’d, ill-assorted, cruel and generous mother!...
…I have asked—is this humanity—these butchers’ shambles? I have asked—will the devils in us win the day?
I have asked what the bond is between us.

This week on the blog, Phil Lemos considers what novels best embody the most loved and notorious US presidents, Garrett Zecker discusses the daunting task of choosing what to read, and David Moloney talks storage units.

Last Week/This Week: Shitstorms, Race, and Slime

September 18, 2017 by Ashley Bales

by Ashley Bales

We’ve made it to another week without being blown into the ocean or blasted into a radiated hell-scape, though philosopher Byung-Chul Han thinks our values are being swallowed up in a social media “shitstorm.” Adrian Nathan West’s piece in the LARB reminded me to finish Han’s treatise, In the Swarm, a critique of the effects of the digital age on our lives, sociality and power structures. It has me glad my foundational worldview is biological not philosophical. How depressing to always be thinking about the degradation of humanistic values, much better to reject the concept of humanistic values all together. Ok, ok, our value systems are ecologically and evolutionarily embedded. They will not get sucked into Han’s “shitstorm” and go poof as easily as our disintegrating civil liberties. I didn’t say there weren’t consequences, but our humanity isn’t at stake. I had an up-side when I started this paragraph: grateful to be slaving away at self-production, about to pour over Han’s book.

In other depressing, internet-related news: Amazon ‘pays 11 times less corporation tax than traditional booksellers.’

Toni Morrison discusses her career-long exploration of writing race without color as a means to “…defang racism, annihilate and discredit the routine, easy, available color fetish, which is reminiscent of slavery itself;” Thrity Umrigar is pressured to write only characters belonging to her race; and Mountainview Alumna Nadia Owusu explores the complexity of blackness and her experience as the lighter skinned black girl at her boarding school. Owusu writes: “I used to look to literature to help me understand how to exist in an often racist world. I sought to understand the unjust rules, and admittedly, how to make them bend in my favor. Now, I read to understand how to reject them, how to rewrite them.”

This week on the blog, Phil Lemos compares writing a novel to managing a warehouse, a new poem by Curtis Graham, and Daniel Johnson considers the sensory ecstasy of Instagram slime videos.

Ashley Bales is a current student of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

Last Week/This Week: New Students, Old Arguments, and a Death

September 11, 2017 by Ashley Bales

by Ashley Bales

The world is full of change and tragedy: John Ashbery died, fall 2017 semesters started across the country, and I am reading a book on my phone. That list may suffer from issues of scale and context, but not sincerity. A tragic loss is followed by the inevitable ticking forward of academic clocks to the tune of incoming freshman that will soon demand post-millennial identities, and a stubborn holdout (me) is pushed along.

The academy continues to rage at itself: down with historic-contextualism, three cheers for practical criticism. Roth’s irate review of Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Joseph North may go a bit too far in bashing literature departments by dismissing their central goal of “the production of knowledge” as a backward facing circle jerk. But one can only hope that the call to action from both author and critic for a more pedagogical focus in which literature may be experienced as opposed to simply contextualized will be answered. For better or worse, my students want nothing more than for me to tell them about themselves—the little egoists.

As I I shuffle my own way up the ivory tower—hearing the scholars rumble, still closer to the students—new semesters mean new jobs. Mixed feelings is how I’d describe the revelation that one of these new employers has a tenure-like system for adjuncts. Tenure-adjacent, you won’t get fired, but you won’t have the time or energy for any frivolous writing (or knowledge production). The other new employer had me interviewed by students for a week not to see if I got the job (which I had), but if my class would be a good fit for them. The pedagogy there runs deep. Perhaps there’s hope after all?

In other shocking changes to what we read and its context: a Page-Turner post on “The Promise and Potential of Fanfiction” proved portentous as “Alleged Author of…My Immortal…Announces Book Deal.” Sometimes these things happen and there’s no fighting it.

For antidote: Mountainview visiting author Joshua Cohen has a new story out in Wired, and faculty member Justin Taylor reviews Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart in the current issue of Bookforum.

This week on the blog we'll have current student Garrett Zecker discussing Zweig on the 75th anniversary of his suicide and Eddie Dzialo on the difficulty of writing war. Alumnus David Moloney finds "Devils at the Stateline."